Data: Wrong; Sustainability: Don't care; Robert Wintner: Aquarium trade should stop!

[albert_dao]

Originally Posted by Myka

You have the LFS owner who can't see past dollar signs (although for good reason). He sees the wild caught fish for half the price on the fish list and can't seem to grasp the fact that landed cost (shipping, permits, losses) will often make a basic captive bred fish cheaper, like Clownfish, Dottybacks, Seahorses, Gobies, Blennies, Cardinals, and even Mandarins. He refuses to pay a reasonable price for the captive bred fish so few small scale captive breeding programs actually have any sort of profit. Most of the LFS owners involved here on CanReef tend to be fairly advanced, and more open to small scale captive breeding programs.

Are you implicating that the typical small business owner has not even the slightest notion regarding their own finances? That is a ridiculous and heavy handed assessment of the situation! Where's your evidence? Cite your sources?

No, they do not land at the same price. No, they are not identical looking animals.

Allow me to illustrate:

Typical captive-bred orchid dottyback






Typical wild-caught orchid dottyback






Typical captive-bred fang blenny







Typical wild-caught fang blenny






There is a noticeable and obvious difference in quality between these samples. This is even more obvious in the most ubiquitous captive-bred marine fish of them all, the clownfish. Next time you're looking at a CB clownfish that isn't a $300+ Grade A Picasso or whatever, look at its gills and the profile of its head. More often than not, they'll be flared and notched, in that order.

I'm all for captive rearing and all and there are definitely a few farms out there that push out high quality stock (Sustainable Aquatics in Jefferson City, TN is one of them), but the vast majority (I'm looking at you, ORA) don't seem to care about letting out only top quality fish if they're not worth triple digits. This is something that should not be supported any more than one would support a puppy mill. Yes, I'm going there. Ethics all-in.

Tack onto this that the average LANDED price (no, not every city has access to a local breeder) is often 1.5-10x higher than the LANDED price of a WC animal and you'll be quick to conclude what the "true" motivations of a typical LFS owner are.